On the Ho Chi Minh Trail

As stated before, I arrived on Monday evening and immediately had to negotiate the taxi system in order to get to my hotel. Once there and settled, I headed out to explore the area - plus I was quite hungry at this time. The hotel is in the main backpacker district, in district 1, on Pham Ngu Lao street. This street is littered with hotels, shops, stalls, restaurants and lots of scooters parked on the footpath (thus making safe passage near on impossible as you then have to venture on to the road). In addition to this, the street is full of locals trying to sell you things and get you to hire a scooter or a cyclo tour of the city. They're not as persistent as in some countries (e.g. Egypt), but after a while it does still become pretty draining. Anyway, I made my way around exploring the area. It was pretty warm, and you also have to take very good care with your luggage, the scooters can just fly past and rip your backpack off - considering at times I had to venture on to the road I was extremely careful. I walked around a bit, amazed by the sounds (and smells - lots of locals have their own street food stalls with noodles cooking and so on, with others sitting around eating their noodles - and then of course there are some areas where the smells are less savoury!) and then tried to find a restaurant - again the waiters approach you and try to wave a menu under your nose so you'll go to their restaurant. In the end I found one with relatively cheap food, and people in there eating (and it looked clean!) so in I went. I ordered pho, which is a traditional Vietnamese noodle soup dish - it was very yummy and I was quite pleased. However at the end of the meal I began to suspect that perhaps all was not above board in this restaurant, as i observed a young man who was approached by the waiter (as i had been), who then turned bright red, looked up at the second floor of the building, smiled, nodded, and then was ushered to the back of the restaurant and up the stairs. He certainly didn't reappear during the time I was there, and when I left, I too looked up at the second level - and it didn't look like a restaurant to me! It reminded me of a time in Lisbon where we thought we were in a restaurant / bar but in fact turned out to be in a brothel!

I headed back to my hotel and enjoyed a very good night's sleep. I awoke refreshed the next morning to the sounds of people clambering up and down the stairs - the breakfast run had begun. So I headed down to breakfast, which consisted of eggs any way you wanted them, a baguette, and coffee. The woman cooked it there and then in the little hovel in the breakfast room.

The night before, on my way back to the hotel, I had pre-booked (for $9) a one day tour to the Mekong Delta. The tour took in the cities of My Tho and Ben Tre. The bus met us at the tour office where I booked it, and then took us for the drive to the first stop - a cafe on the side of the road. As we were driving out of Ho Chi Minh I was amazed at the scooters - crammed full of items, stacked very tall and not looking terribly stable. One bloke was carrying a TV strapped to the back of his scooter, another had a load of boxes stacked very tall, another had 2 adults and 2 kids all on the one scooter. It was astonishing.

We arrived at the cafe and immediately were accosted by the street sellers wanting to sell us sunglasses, postcards, jewellery - you name it, they were selling it. The cafe was of interest apparently because of its hammocks - all along the highway there are loads of cafes with hammocks, designed for the traveller. The idea is that as you are driving long distances on your scooter you often get tired, so you need a rest - so you buy a coffee, lie back in a hammock, and have a little nap. Quite a good idea really.

It was then back on the bus and off to the next stop, which was a small village within the delta itself. At this village we enjoyed fresh fruit whilst watching an entertaining show given by the local family. One of the singers was the Japanese guide for our tour. He gave an amusing performance of a love duet with his daughter - quite strange, particularly for the unusual nasal sounds that are typical of traditional Vietnamese song. The accompanists were interesting too, with one guy playing a traditional Vietnamese guitar and foot castanet, and the other guy on regular guitar.

The fruit was quite nice - the most unusual being the dragon fruit, which just looks like a poppy seed cake but which is obviously not.

After this they put us in sampan canoes and ferried us, gondola fashion, up the delta. In my sampan was 2 Canadians and a British girl. The Canadians were a bit older and were lovely - Helen and Doug - and we had quite a good chat.

The sampan cruise was very interesting for its insight into river life along the delta. The people use the river for everything. Anything that can float is used as a boat or a form of transportation. We even observed a boat which was dredging the bottom of the river and dumping the sand on the deck of the boat, to dry off and thus make bricks for houses. It was pretty cool (but apparently illegal as they're not supposed to dredge that part of the river!).

The journey brought us to the lunch venue, which was lovely. The lunch however was a bit skimpy, I thought - a tiny piece of pork with some steamed vegetables and small portion of rice. You had to pay to have anything extra with it!

After lunch we were taken to the candy making workshop, where we observed family members crushing coconut and making a sticky toffee paste to create coconut candy. You could have a go at cutting it up and wrapping your own in rice paper, and of course you could buy - but seeing as no one seemed to have very clean hands, and they were making these on top of an uncovered aluminum bench under a straw roofed open walled hut - no one was really up for it. So instead they gave us honey tea and then one of the guys brought out a python for people to have a hold of. Strange!

After this we headed back along the river in the bigger boat. It was again very interesting to see the river life - particularly the houses along the bank, which looked like there was no way they should really be standing at all, they were like little shanty towns.

Upon our return to the city we boarded the bus and headed off to a nearby Buddhist temple. This particular temple had a very ornate bonsai garden - not the real little bonsai trees that you get in the shops, but rather large ones, at least human height tall. The temple also had a large fat little squat Buddha statue with the dirty great big grin - but what I thought most amusing was in the title underneath the statue, it said "phat" - which of course he was!

Eventually it was time to head back to Ho Chi Minh. I dumped my stuff at the hotel and then promptly headed out again - now in search of the hotel I will check into tomorrow for the start of my Gap Adventures tour. Apparently it was (according to Google maps) only a 5 minute walk away. Clearly though Google hadn't accounted for "crossing the road in Vietnam" time! It was literally mad - I had been warned by Helen and Doug about crossing the road near the Ben Thanh market roundabout, but seriously, this was something else! It was near on impossible to get across! Eventually I had to just go for it, and luckily didn't get hit. I found the hotel we will be staying at, and then ventured over to the Ben Thanh market - but it was closed. I did however have a look at some of the shops nearby as I decided, starting to do some research on a new daybag as my current one, a free "Fitness First" gym bag that Iva gave me when she left London, really has seen better days.

After much searching I finally gave up the mission - I was really tired after all - and tomorrow is another day...